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KentuckyFC (1144503) writes "If you've been living under a stone, you might not have heard last week's announcement that astrophysicists from the BICEP2 experiment have found the first evidence of two extraordinary things. The first is primordial gravitational waves--ripples in spacetime from the very first moments after the Big Bang. The second is that these waves are evidence of inflation, the theory that the universe expanded rapidly, by twenty orders of magnitude in the blink of an eye after the Big Bang. But that can only be possible if the gravitational waves formed before inflation occurred. Now critics have begun to mutter that the waves might have formed later and so provide no evidence of inflation. The new thinking is that as the universe cooled down after inflation, various phase changes occurred in the Universe which generated the laws of physics we see today. These phase changes would have been violent events that generated their own ripples in space time, which would look very much like the primordial gravitational waves that the BICEP2 team claims to have found. So the BICEP2 team must rule out this possibility before they can claim evidence of inflation. But the critics say the data does not yet allow this to be done. That doesn't mean inflation didn't occur. Indeed, the critics say this is still the most likely explanation. But until the phase change possibility is ruled out, the result must be considered ambiguous. So put the champagne back in the fridge."

This aspect of the story is great as an example of science.It seems stubborn to hold onto a single interpretation of evidence during pursuit a theory, including the origin of the universe.Science is the willingness to relegate that evidence to be less significant than what some people want it to be.When you won't relegate the evidence, then you are practicing faith (in the evidence) instead of science.

Absolutely. Regardless of whether the results confirm or are consistent with the theory of Inflation, the every existence of coherant structure the scale of the universe itself is an amazing result. By default, there is no reason to expect any structure whatsoever at the highest cosmic sale. (I would argue that up to now this, there was essentially no struture to the CMB)

Yet here we have "waves" of polarisation over a gigantic region of the night sky. The Universe has uniform strutures at the most enormous scales. It's a deep and awesome result that must be addressed, by inflation or whatever other theory we can propose for it.

Over the last... long while now scientists have developed a bad habit of getting really excited and presenting findings as concrete, only to get shot down. Besides, doesn't an experiment have to be repeated for the results to be confirmed? Regardless, if the alternate interpretation proves true, I find it no less significant.

It's customary in science to present your findings exactly as they are, with the statistical certainty associated with the findings. They never said their results were confirmed or "concrete", they said their findings confirmed several other theories and that they were highly certain of the results given the known sources of error and the model they were using. You can always come up with other theories that would also fit the observational data: heck, half the point of publishing your data is so the scientific community can look at it and see if you did something wrong, or if there are other interpretations that fit the data better.